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5 minute(s) of a 57 minute read
5-9-2013
January 10th, 2013
I survived the holidays and was ready to get back in the garage. Where to start? I'm a novice mechanic but I knew how to turn a wrench. I went to Harbor Freight and started buying toys, um, I mean tools. I bought 4 floor jacks and some wrenches. I got back home and lifted the car. I stared pulling the rear end apart and learned my first lesson. Use the car jack to lift the rear axle when you're pulling the tie rods off the car with the car suspended. DUH! You'll learn from my mistakes throughout the build. I popped the other bars off and the axle dropped like a bag of concrete. Let's just say the limiting straps did their job! I than bagged and labeled all the bolts and started cleaning the bars. They would later be powder coated. Also, I started pulling the brake and fuel lines and placing them on the car so I wouldn't step on them. Oh yeah, get yourself a breaker bar!!!!!! These bolts almost busted my shoulders after the first 3 hours of work and than I grabbed a 3 foot pipe. So much easier!
Yeah! I pulled the rear axle out! How do I put it back in? More on that later....
I used an angle grinder on the bars and brake sheilds. Ready for sand blasting and powder coating.
Here is a picture of the brake and fuel lines pulled and set on the car. Keep the lines off the ground or you will step on one or more and have to replace it! This can ruin your day!
The next step was the most labor intensive work I've ever done in my life. I started with a heat gun and scraper and started removing the undercoating. After a couple days I switched it up to a wire wheel and angle grinder. This is what I ended up with after about 25 hours.
You can see I ran over the drain plugs with the wire wheel and pulled them out. I thought it would be easy to get new ones....little did I know. I scraped, grinded and groaned for a total of 180+ hours until I had this:
The green is primer so I didn't get surface rust!
So much better! Advice of the day. The undercoating comes off the wire wheel like dust. When you get it hot, step on it, sweep it, or even look at it wrong it will smear. It is tar based and gets everywhere! Epoxy your garage floor after this step. Mine is ruined. Also, wear a respirator!!!! Here's my face after a couple hours of work. I was completely covered!
Now we're around mid to late Feb. 2013
I moved from the back of the car to the front with the undercoating. Here's a picture of the front wheel well. You'll also notice there wasn't any rust! I couldn't believe it! This is about 9 or 10 hours of work for one wheel well! Pretty sweet looking though.
So here we are in around the end of February and I needed more room under the car. So I went to The Home Repo and bought some lumber and made this!
The date was around March 1 and I started on labeling the wirinng in the engine bay. Every piece of blue tape is labeled.
Everything was labeled and I thought it would be a good idea to do this...
Back to Harbor Freight for an engine stand!
